Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception [Hardcover]

Pamela Meyer (Author)

Book Description

Release date: July 20, 2010

GET TO THE TRUTH

People--friends, family members, work colleagues, salespeople--lie to us all the time.  Daily, hourly, constantly. None of us is immune, and all of us are victims. According to studies by several different researchers, most of us encounter nearly 200 lies a day. 

Now there’s something we can do about it. Liespotting links three disciplines--facial recognition training, interrogation training, and a comprehensive survey of research in the field--into a specialized body of information developed specifically to help business leaders detect deception and get the information they need to successfully conduct their most important interactions and transactions.

Some of the nation's leading business executives have learned to use these methods to root out lies in high stakes situations. Liespotting for the first time brings years of knowledge--previously found only in the intelligence community, police training academies, and universities--into the corporate boardroom, the manager's meeting, the job interview, the legal proceeding, and the deal negotiation.

 

WHAT'S IN THE BOOK?

Learn communication secrets previously known only to a handful of scientists, interrogators and intelligence specialists.

Liespotting reveals what’s hiding in plain sight in every business meeting, job interview and negotiation:

• The single most dangerous facial expression to watch out for in business & personal relationships

• 10 questions that get people to tell you anything

• A simple 5-step method for spotting and stopping the lies told in nearly every high-stakes business negotiation and interview

• Dozens of postures and facial expressions that should instantly put you on Red Alert for deception

• The telltale phrases and verbal responses that separate truthful stories from deceitful ones

• How to create a circle of advisers who will guarantee your success

 

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Every decision maker in your organization should read this breakthrough book. It is practical, hands-on and founded on years of research. It offers the easily accessible methods to spot and stop what has become the most insidious business cost today…deception.” —Richard Whiteley, Best-selling author of The Customer Driven Company, Customer Centered Growth,  Love the Work You’re With, and The Corporate Shaman

"All businesses spend a tremendous amount of time and money trying to detect just how truthful people are. The stakes are high. Despite the fact that few of us have never studied how to objectively read people and understand the many established ways of detecting unconscious communication, we are surprised at how often we get it wrong when the whole truth is finally known. This book changes the odds, and does it in a straightforward, useful and engaging way. It's worth every minute you spend reading it."—Jay Walker, Founder, Priceline.com and named inventor on more than 400 U.S. patents.

From the Back Cover

Learn communication secrets previously known only to a handful of scientists, interrogators and intelligence specialists.

Liespotting reveals what’s hiding in plain sight in every business meeting, job interview and negotiation:

• The single most dangerous facial expression to watch out for in business & personal relationships

• 10 questions that get people to tell you anything

• A simple 5-step method for spotting and stopping the lies told in nearly every high-stakes business negotiation and interview

• Dozens of postures and facial expressions that should instantly put you on Red Alert for deception

• The telltale phrases and verbal responses that separate truthful stories from deceitful ones

• How to create a circle of advisers who will guarantee your success

Read Liespotting and gain access to a secret language of gestures, words, and emotions. Learn to see through any business or personal encounter, get right to the truth, and build a world of trusted, expert advisers around you.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1 edition (July 20, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312601875
• ISBN-13: 978-0312601874
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (86 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,975 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #18 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Occupational & Organizational
  • #40 in Books > Education & Reference > Words, Language & Grammar > Communication

More About the Author

Pamela Meyer is founder and CEO of Simpatico Networks, a leading private label social networking company that owns and operates online social networks. She holds an MBA from Harvard, an MA in Public Policy from Claremont Graduate School, and is a Certified Fraud Examiner.

She has extensive training in advanced interviewing and interrogation techniques, facial micro-expression reading, body language interpretation, statement analysis, and behavior elicitation techniques. For the book Liespotting, she worked with a team of researchers over several years and completed a comprehensive survey of all of the published research on deception detection.

The most interesting highlights from the research survey are included in the book, while additional new findings are regularly featured on her blog, www.Liespotting.com

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 79 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars full of very useful facts December 14, 2010

By jjolla

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Most of the books I have bought share an annoying characteristic ... the authors have only a handful of ideas to present. In order to fill a book to make it look like we are buying something worthwhile, they create pages and pages of useless filler diatribe.

This book was a refreshing surprise. Every page has at least one interesting fact which most of us will find useful in our lives sometime in the future.

The book is well edited and presents its information in an easy to read format. Because of this well-laid arrangement, we are also able to easily assimilate the many facts into a bigger whole, making this a true gem.

93 of 99 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A complete revelation. July 21, 2010

By Aleister

Format:Hardcover

A complete revelation. Meyer presents the most comprehensive guide to the science of deception I have ever encountered. Untruths are an unfortunate reality of my career, whether harmless social posturing, or truly insidious acts of deceit, and this book breaks open the subject - not to mention the human psyche - at a truly remarkable level. In addition, the author distills lie-spotting techniques to their most practical, their least intrusive. I felt as though I had been given social and professional x-ray specs, but no one will know I am wearing them.

Overall, a totally fantastic read - I can't say enough about the accomplishment.

115 of 134 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating but a little serious July 25, 2010

By WashDCRunner

Format:Hardcover

I bought the book this week after hearing the writer speak at Barnes and Noble. Her talk was fascinating. She outlined research that she undertook with a team of researchers over four years, reviewing each study and making sure that only the data in the book which was confirmed by more than one study was included. The footnotes in the book are longer than some of the chapters!..some people might not like that, which is why Im saying its a little serious.... I like this book because it takes complicated findings and makes them entertaining. I was also fascinated to find out that the writer had mastered the facial expression reading coding system as well as emotion reading, through study with the folks that work with Paul Elman, the guy Lie to Me is based on. She described looking at 1/15th of a second of video and having to fill out a two page data sheet on every single muscle that contracted and every single combination of muscles that were engaged in the exact sequence and the exact intensity they were pulled up. Later, she showed me one of those coding sheets and I couldn't believe how complex the system is. Her book makes it so much simpler. She also took Ekman's work farther by training in interrogation and talked a lot about the difference between the findings on the ground, tha law enforcement officials rely on, vs the findings that social science rsearchers like Ekman and someone else, a woman called de Paulo have found. I didn't realize until I eardher speak, just how much more developed this field is, than one would think, watching Lie to Me, which she really likes and says you can learn from.

40 of 44 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Too much filler October 29, 2011

By Left Coaster

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I bought the book on the basis of the author's TED talk, which I loved. However, the book is a disappointment. The actual "liespotting" information is good, and very readable, but there's not enough of it. Then there is the filler that goes on and on. The filler material takes two forms: 1) topics that are only marginally related (for example, "Doing a deception audit at your corporation"...really? This is not of much interest in a book that presents itself as a how-to on discovering lies in personal interactions), and 2) stretching out the actual liespotting material with tiresome justifications telling you why it's a good thing to be able to spot lies. Telling me once is fine; telling me over and over is filler.

The photos were a good idea. I would have liked to see more of them, though, and more subtle ones, as well.

Whoever was editing this book must have been forcing the author to make it longer, rather than doing the better job of tightening it up and keeping the focus where it belongs. Good idea, good kernel of information, but poor execution.

37 of 43 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Padded writing, strained arguments. March 22, 2012

By Lemas Mitchell

Format:Hardcover

You too can write a book about microexpressions by reading enough webpages! It seems like her references were tons of: 1) Interviews; 2) Websites/Internet Articles; 3) Multiply cited (sparse) primary sources (I lost count of how many times I saw the word "ibid" among the references).

Several things immediately popped out at me in the course of reading this book (I made it to page 130 and someone expressed interest in buying the and so I *immediately* stopped and sold it to them for something like $5).

1. There is no index.
2. These are things that the author figured out herself. Not things that she was trained to know (and if she was a self-trained Ph.D., it would have been fine if she was opening up a new field). I think it's said that a person who teaches himself has a fool for a student
3. Book has a babbly, padded feel. Around p. 12: Are you talking about the evolution of lying in humans? Or about increased lying in American society? Or spotting an online liar? Pick one topic and stick with it.
4. For about the first 21 pages, she tells us what she is *going* to tell us (keep in mind that this is only about a 205 page book).

There are also some weird lines of reasoning that were not flushed all the way out:

1. How to distinguish lying for a reason from pathological lying? 2. Should highly evolved people be more likely to lie? The highest IQ ethnic group (Ashkenazi Jews) built up their legal system (Halakah) based on honesty and consistency, so that doesn't seem quite true.
3. p.23. You can't be lied to without your consent? Um, hello? The reason that you are being lied to is because YOU DON'T KNOW. Can I suppose that all the people who go to university and get ripped off with worthless degrees really consented to that?
4.... If lying categorically has a selective advantage, shouldn't we all have evolved to be pathological liars?
5. She gets into the well-trodden area of microexpressions. You'd almost think that there was no debate about that topic (there is). A chapter on that would have really helped a lot, because the concept really strains credulity.

Then, there was lots of *really obvious* stuff.

1. Liars can't keep their story straight when they talk to you?
2. Liars tend to stutter and use phrases to buy time?
3. The reasons that people lie to you? Anyone over 12 needs to be told these things?

Then, there was REALLY weird stuff:

1. We get lied to 200 times per day? So, we have 16 waking hours a day. That's 12.5 times per hour. Or one time every 4.8 minutes. Does anyone even hear that many (200) assertive statements per day?
2. People who cover their eyes "see no evil"?
3. Plants have developed camaflouge, so they too are liars??
4. p. 125. "Liars want to tell you the truth"? Um, OK.

Save your money. I think I bought this second hand, and so I recouped nearly all of what I spent. But I can't get back the time that I spent on this book. Based on the number of reviews, I think What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading Peopleappears to be a better choice. Read more ›